Speech recognition systems may receive and interpret verbal input from users and may take actions based on the input. For example, some users employ speech recognitions systems to create text documents based on spoken words. A user may speak into a microphone connected to a computer, and speech recognition software installed on the computer may receive the spoken words, translate the sounds into text, and output the text to a display.
Current speech recognition systems, however, do not translate the spoken words with complete accuracy. Sometimes the systems will translate a spoken word into text that does not correspond to the spoken word. This problem is especially apparent when the spoken word is a word that is not in a language model accessed by the speech recognition system. The system receives the new spoken word, but incorrectly translates the word because the new spoken word does not have a corresponding textual definition in the language model. For example, the words “da shiznet” expresses a popular way, in current language, to describe something that is “the best.” Language models, however, may not include this phrase, and the system may attempt to translate the phrase based on current words in the language model. This results in incorrect translation of the phrase “da shiznet” into other words, such as “dashes net.”
Additionally, current speech recognition systems may incorrectly translate a spoken word because people may pronounce the word differently. For example, if a speech recognition system is accessed by people from different regions of a country, the users may have particular regional accents that cause a recognition system to translate their spoken words incorrectly. Some current systems require that a user train the speech recognition system by speaking test text so that it recognizes the user's particular pronunciation of spoken words. This method, however, creates a recognition system that is trained to one user's pronunciation, and may not accurately translate another user's verbal input if it is pronounced differently.